(For those who don’t get it.)
Posting for a colleague, who leads a great structural bioinformatics group in Valencia. Structural Genomics Unit Bioinformatics & Genomics Department – Príncipe Felipe Research Center Seeking a Bioniformatician and a Postdoc The Structural Genomics Unit at the CIPF (Valencia, Spain) seeks candidates for two open positions: Open position in RNA 3D modeling (Technician/Bioinformatician) Open position in […]
Pawel on Open Science. Full disclosure: I consider sharing an office with this guy for over a year to be one of the best experiences of my postdoc.
Yes! Why should the evolution people have all the fun with their blog carnival? (After all, it is only a theory.) It’s time for bioinformaticians to show what we are made of, and to have a carnival of our own. Bio::blogs had a good run some time ago. I decided to reconnect what is hopefully […]
Pharmaceutical companies are always on the lookout for secondary drug targets. After all, if you invest billions developing a single drug, you would be more than happy to sell it as a treatment for two, three, or more different ailments. Sildenafil citrate was developed to treat angina and hypertension, but during phase I clinical trials, […]
I just spent the better part of a Saturday playing with Foldit. Foldit is an ongoing experiment in finding protein structures by harnessing the power of the mob – or gamers, as is the case here. The player is presented with a backbone & sidechain configuration, with the secondary structures mostly pre-determined. The problem is […]
Warren DeLano passed away suddenly and at a young age at his home Nov 3, 2009. He was the author of PyMol, a very popular molecular visualization program, and a strong advocate of open source software. The family of Warren Lyford DeLano has created a “In Memorium” page and blog. Also, a memorial award is […]
For those who are not in the structural biology community: Warren DeLano wrote and maintained PyMol, the software of choice for molecular visualization. Practically anyone who published anything requiring a biomolecular image used PyMol. It is a great piece of software, powerful and extensible. Warren was strongly committed to writing quality product that served the […]
This has been a topic of discussion since I was in grad school: when will the Nobel prize for the structure of the ribosome be finally awarded? Well, it finally has. Ada Yonath, Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan received the Nobel for work that has spanned three decades and an equal number of continents. […]
Proteins are the machinery of life, and they facilitate most of life’s functions. Traffic into and out of the cell? Protein pumps, pores and channels. Respiration? Proteins. Metabolism and catabolism? Proteins. Immune system, signaling, development… all complex networks of interacting proteins. Understanding a protein’s structure can tell us a lot about how it performs its […]
Maintaining a water balance is essential to life. Cells must regulate their water content carefully and within a very narrow margin. Too much water intake, and the cell bursts like a water balloon; too much water outflow, and it shrivels like a raisin. The cell itself is contained in a waterproof membrane. But there are […]
Harvard University has removed from YouTube the video I embedded in my Leonardo Da Vinci and the F0-F1 ATPase post, due to copyright concerns. It is a pity. I believe the main sufferer from this step is the lab that actually created this video, and now has one outlet less to publicize its work. One […]
Offspring #2 (O2) and I spent last weekend visiting the Da Vinci Experience exhibit at San Diego’s Air & Space Museum. The exhibit is engineer’s heaven: large wood models based on and inspired by LDV’s drawings. Gears, crankshafts, pulleys. O2 was interested in the military stuff: catapults, the tank , a mobile bridge. I did […]
We learned in high school and/or undergrad biology that one antibody would bind to one antigen. This is what makes our immune system so effective: antibodies bind with high affinity to foreign proteins or other molecules. Not only that, but those antibodies are specific: they would bind only to a specific site on the foreign […]
